Comments on my stories are usually dumb, but if people take the time to email, they are almost always thoughtful, and sometimes quite lovely. Here is one I quite liked from my robotics in the apple orchard story:

Jackie, greatly enjoyed  your Apple Orchard article
My Dad was born and raised on my grandfather’s 400-acre apple farm in Kinderhook, NY.
I can well recall his stories of the farm, to include tree planting, picking, pruning, storing, packing and shipping apples.
It was all handwork, with the workdays being long and physically demanding.
When Dad shared stories of the farm it was always started with the family – two brothers and sisters, in addition to my grandparents and the effort by all that went into the growing and selling of apples.
My grandfather graduated from Princeton University in 1909 and with the help of his father acquired the farm in 1912.  He sold the farm in 1955 and lived for about another 30 years.
If my Dad and Grandfather – also my Grandmother, who born and lived in Kinderhook her entire life – could read your article each would say “sounds great – but there is much to a growing a good apple.”
Again, enjoyed your article – makes me feel good and look back on the farm, my grandparents and for sure my Dad.
Thank you.

I wrote about how robots are increasingly used in apple orchards for Wall Street Journal. Every piece of tree fruit is picked by hands (well, except for a few in orchards where researchers test these robots out). It’s grueling work even though orchards have been engineered to make picking as simple as possible—the trees are more like grape vines at this point, only about twelve feet tall and grown to keep apples on a two-dimension plane. Standardizing the trees also lets robots, which really struggle in outdoor settings, pick about fifty percent of the fruit right now. So despite the really out of pocket comments on this story, human workers are still needed and not going anywhere. (Gift link)

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Anthropic job app via Simon Willison’s blog

Most concrete in the United States is prepared to order at batch plants—souped-up materials depots where the ingredients are combined, dosed out from hoppers into special mixer trucks, and then driven to job sites. Because concrete grows too stiff to work after about 90 minutes, concrete production is highly local. There are more ready-mix batch plants in the United States than there are Burger King restaurants.

This makes it incredibly hard to decarbonize concrete, one of the biggest greenhouse emitters. But researchers are trying anyway! Great story on IEEE about greening concrete.

The changes in social media over the last 18 months, but especially the last month or so, have caused me major whiplash. While I sort out what makes sense for me to do, both as a journalist (which, at the very least, keeps me on every platform to get a hold of sources) and as a normie/civilian/whatever (do I have to post? Nope), I want to control a sliver of the internet.

This will be part portfolio, part hobbies, part fun things I find on the internet. So that means a lot of AI writing, some surf videos, definitely some romance book musings, probably clips showing a Muay Thai technique or two, and bits about the new word games I find and obsess over for a week (it’s been a while, what’s good?)

Stay tuned while I figure out what controlling the means of publication looks like.